And Some Will Pay
by Cimz
Summary: On January 13, 2012, John burst into Blair's bedroom to arrest Todd. Here's what Blair did next. Not compatible with GH or OLTL 2.0. One shot.


**And Some Will Pay**

"_And some will pay for their crimes. But why spoil what happens next? You of all people should know: things are rarely what they appear!"_

_-Allison Perkins, One Life to Live, January 13, 2012_

For the first time in the better part of a decade, Todd Manning was relaxed and happy. Blair was warm and the tangled sheets were cool. His body was at rest as Blair's fingers teased his groin through the sheets. His mind was occupied with some silly afterplay conversation about who was going to sing what to whom and why.

Predictably, that was when everything went to hell.

The bedroom door banged open, and everything in Todd tensed immediately. For eight years, his nervous system had been trained to expect pain when a door flew open in anger.

"_LPD! Freeze!" _bellowed John McBain. McBain was accompanied by a SWAT team with weapons at the ready. Apparently Todd and Blair, naked and spent from three rounds of the best sex anyone had ever had, warranted such precautions.

Or, more likely, McBain was just interested in humiliating Todd. Todd didn't know why that would be. When he'd first returned to Llanview, he'd thought McBain was an okay guy- especially for a cop. But an okay guy would not have done this, not to Todd and certainly not to Blair.

"What the hell?" Blair demanded.

"Sorry. We knocked. Repeatedly," McBain smirked. "Sometimes the fellas get a little antsy. Todd Manning, you're under arrest for the murder of Victor Lord Junior."

In slow motion, Blair turned to look at Todd. In slow motion, he met her eyes.

"_You know me," _he'd told Blair over and over since he'd returned from his lost eight years. It had been a nice thought, a comforting thought, something to hold on to. He wasn't sure whether it was true, though. He wasn't sure of his own thoughts; how could he be sure of Blair's?

He looked into the eyes of the woman he had loved for most of his life and had no idea what she was going to do.

He soon found out.

Blair sprang from the bed, naked as the day she was born, and looked McBain in the eye. "Wipe that smirk off of your face or I will do it for you."

McBain rolled his eyes heavenward, more immune to Blair's nakedness than Todd would have preferred. "Blair," he began.

"Don't _Blair_ me. Don't act like I'm being cute and irrational when you've just barged into my bedroom so your little SWAT team could get a free peep show." She turned to John's second-in-command. "I'll tell you what, buddy, you couldn't afford to watch an adult film starring _this_."

"Put on your clothes, M'am," the second-in-command instructed. "But stay where we can see you."

"Of course, stay where you can see me. That's the point of all of this, isn't it? Todd wasn't going anywhere. You could have waited. You could have found him anywhere else. You could have shouted. You didn't, because you were just so eager to run and tell Tea that not only did you arrest the man she hates, you did it in the most degrading way you possibly could. Right?"

"Tea has nothing to do with this."

"You mean she isn't the next damsel in distress you have lined up now that you have Natalie on the hook? Tea's all vulnerable and pregnant, John, and Natalie has her life together. We all know that's not attractive to you."

"This is not about Tea or Natalie or you or Marty," said John quietly.

"Why would it be about Marty?" Todd asked, because after learning that another man had lived his life for eight years, he didn't like to be ignored- not even at his own arrest.

"The usual sordid story," said Blair. She strolled back to the bed, offering McBain and his goon a magnificent view of her perfect ass and her long long legs. She sat down on the edge of the bed, mindless of the gun that was still pointed at both of them. "You remember how I told you that Victor locked Marty up in that house where Tea lives now? Made it his little love nest when she had amnesia and didn't know any better?"

"That wasn't something I was likely to forget, Blair," Todd said tersely.

"Well, John here was pining after Marty the whole time she was gone. You know, the way men do. And when she didn't have any interest in him, he decided to settle for me. The way men do."

Todd shivered. Two hours ago, when the world had been perfect, he and Blair had talked about that very thing. Their relationship had never recovered from his decision to go to Ireland to help Marty; they had spent twenty years fighting to regain that moment. Fool that he was, he'd thought they'd done it this time.

"That's not what happened," John objected, but Blair ignored him.

"Anyway, before the sheets were cool- it was not these sheets or this bed, if you'd let me finish you'd understand why I had them replaced- John jumped out of my bed to go rescue Marty and one of the many men who decided it was okay to barge into my room and violate my privacy stabbed me. Now, me bleeding almost to death made me much more attractive to John so he married me while I was in the hospital-"

"I married you so you'd be able to keep custody of your children," injected John.

"Three guesses who the attorney was who cooked that one up," said Blair. "So I get better and John dumps me again, and he and Marty are rolling merrily along when Natalie's husband is brutally murdered. Now Natalie's the grieving widow who needs all the support she can get, and Marty's no longer kidnapped or out of her mind- at least not more than usual- so which way is John's dick going to point?"

"I don't think I like you treating my niece that way," Todd told John. "I think as a helpful uncle, I should-"

"If you want to be helpful, Manning, why don't you tell Blair to get dressed?"

Todd had been trying to figure out a way to get Blair to cover herself up almost since she'd bounced out of the bed. Her body was his, and his alone. He didn't like hearing about her escapades with John; he liked seeing her blithely display things that were supposed to be private and given in love even less. But he wasn't going to support John McBain, not in any way.

"My woman does what my woman wants," he announced. "She says jump, I say how high. Not the other way around."

"She ask you to shoot your brother and kidnap Tomas Delgado, or did you come up with that all on your own?" McBain asked.

"Stop telling lies about Todd!" Blair injected, which was good, because Todd really had nothing to say to any of that. "Tomas shot Victor. He told me so himself. And speaking of Victor, weren't you the one who was so damn sure that he'd murdered Margaret Cochran that you had him executed? The woman wasn't even dead!"

"That was a different situation."

Blair crossed her arms. "I want Victor's grave exhumed and I want a DNA test run on whatever's in that grave."

"You aren't in a position to make demands, Blair," said John firmly. "You need to get dressed, and Todd needs to get dressed, and Todd needs to come down to the station."

"Send your goons out of the room and turn your back, and we'll consider it."

John waved a dismissal at his supporting cast. They exited obediently, closing the door behind them. "I won't look directly at you, but I'm not turning my back. This guy doesn't stay put in paramilitary facilities. He's not going to stay put when he's got you encouraging him to go out the bedroom window."

With a sarcastic gesture, Blair reached for her own clothes and threw Todd's at him.

* * *

It took Blair the better part of an hour, and an apology that was at least somewhat sincere, to convince John to let her go down to the holding cells to see Todd.

When she got there, she wondered whether it had been her persuasive abilities (or nagging, as Victor had preferred to call it) that had made the difference after all. Todd was sitting rigidly on a bench, hands splayed on his knees, eyes staring blankly ahead. He was chanting under his breath; Blair caught her own name, as well as Starr's and Jack's.

Either the cops had taken pity on Todd or, more likely, they knew that they weren't going to get anything out of him in his current state and were counting on Blair to snap him out of it.

For a second, she considered leaving Todd to an insanity defense. It might be the wisest thing to do.

But wise wasn't her specialty, not when Todd was around.

She bent down and tried to catch his eye. "Todd?" she whispered shakily.

He jumped as if he'd been scalded; she jumped, too, in sympathy. Todd had always been endlessly strong and determined. His legend had only grown in her mind during the long years that they'd been apart. Seeing him look fragile and defeated made her want to burst into tears.

When he looked at her, she could see that he was aware of who she was, at least. But the same fear she'd seen in his eyes back in her bedroom had multiplied a thousandfold.

"They aren't going to give us forever to talk," she told him. "If I'm going to help you, I need to know the truth. Now. Why did you lie about killing Victor?"

Todd began to laugh, but it was a hysterical, panicked laugh.

She waited patiently, hands on hips. Indulging Todd's tangents, be they laughter or commentary on her bedroom curtains, never did any good.

"I love you," Todd said at last. "You don't ask why I killed him, you asked why I lied."

"I love you, too," she said, though she had no idea whether that would be enough. "Answer the question. Way back in Viki's cabin. You were delirious with pain. You couldn't lie about shooting Irene. You insisted that you had to meet with her to get the gun that would prove you didn't shoot the man that your children love so much. How could you lie about this when you couldn't lie about anything else? Or was everything a lie? Was you saying you loved me a-"

"_I love you!"_ It was emphatic and guttural and awfully hard to doubt.

"So you decided to trick stupid old Blair because you loved me so much, the same as you did when you pretended that Jack was dead, the same as you did when you pretended that Starr's baby sitter was killed in a mob hit meant for me, the same as-"

"I didn't know I was lying at the cabin." His voice was shaking. His whole body was shaking. "I saw how happy he made Tea. How much he loved her. Somehow that made it different. I took the gun, but I walked around all night with it. That's it. I still remember it like that. But then Irene told me that I did it and I remembered it that way too."

"How could Irene tell you that you shot Victor? Irene was already dead by the time we talked about it at the cabin. Irene was the reason we were there. She shot you!"

"I know she was dead. But I saw her."

More than anything, Todd looked like Jack had as a little boy when he'd told Blair about his nightmares about zombies.

"Todd," she breathed. She reached through the bars toward him.

"No touching!" snapped one of the guards.

Anger roiled inside of Blair as she obeyed. They'd gone eight years without touching each other. That should have been enough.

"I hate being in jail," Todd said.

"Should have thought about that before you killed your brother," the guard said.

"Shut up," Todd and Blair suggested in unison.

The guard mumbled something and went back to minding his own business.

"He's the one Starr took down," Todd said with a hint of amusement. "You'll have to forgive him if he's still a little embarrassed. I mean, Starr. Never held a gun in her life, right?"

"You need to tell me what you remember," Blair said quietly. "Everything that Irene told you about shooting Victor."

"There isn't that much," Todd admitted. "She told me and there was the quick flash of me standing there. I said 'You take my life, Victor, I take yours,' and I shot him. That was it. It feels like something I would say. It feels like something I would do. It's something I wanted to do."

"But you remembered not doing it."

"I really did." Todd's face crumbled. "I'm broken, Blair. I thought she didn't break me but she did."

"It's nothing we can't fix." She squared her shoulders resolutely. "You don't have to hold on for eight years this time. Just a few more days."

* * *

No one wanted to hear Blair's decision that, as the mother of Victor Lord Junior's eldest (and until Tea gave birth, only) child, she was demanding an exhumation of Victor's grave.

Tea said it would be cruel to Jack and Dani. Blair pointed out that they would only know if Tea told them, and the more cruel thing would be not to voice her doubts. "Victor would understand about being accused of murdering someone who isn't even dead," she repeated as often as she could.

Tomas reminded Blair that there was no doubt that Todd had imprisoned him for the great sin of catching Blair's eye. Blair told Tomas that there was a certain irony in Todd being the bad guy for locking Tomas away for a few months when Tomas had locked Todd away for eight years. It wasn't entirely fair, she knew; Tomas had been doing his job. But she wasn't about to absolve Tomas of all responsibility.

John told Blair that there was a preponderance of evidence supporting Todd as Victor's killer. He had means, motive, and opportunity. Dorian's gun had been the murder weapon. Shaun Evans' voicemail had even recorded the crime.

"You can hear Todd on the voicemail?" she asked curiously.

"No," admitted John. "But you've been insisting that Victor might not be dead when-"

"When he died in my arms!" Tea snapped.

"You were distraught," said Blair. "If the paramedics-"

"_I wasn't too distraught to know the difference between dead and alive, Blair!"_

"Let me listen to the voicemail," Blair pushed. It bothered her that the voicemail didn't have Todd's voice on it if Todd had spoken to Victor as he'd shot him. She'd listened to enough garbled voicemails left by her children from crowded high school hallways to know that conversations elsewhere in the room were easily recorded.

John looked a question at Tea.

"Go ahead," said Tea through her tears. "Let her listen if it will get her off this ridiculous idea that he isn't dead."

The recording was geared up in no time. It was chilling to hear Victor's voice again.

"_Hey, Shaun, it's me. I need to put you back on the payroll, on the order of my ex-wife. It's really nothing. You won't have to do anything at all."_ Victor interrupted himself, evidently sensing another presence in his empty house. "_Hello?" _There was no answer. "_So, uh…" _Victor turned from the phone again, but his voice remained clear. "_Oh my God. What the hell are you doing here?"_

The shot rang out. Footsteps retreated and Victor gasped for breath.

"He didn't say anything," said Blair. "The killer didn't say anything."

"I told you he didn't," said John.

"He was surprised to see the killer," Blair pushed. "Really surprised. If he'd seen Todd, after all the fighting they'd been doing, would that warrant an 'Oh my God, what the hell are you doing here?' Wouldn't he expect to see Todd getting in his face every five minutes?"

"Stop trying to poke holes in the case, Blair," said Tea. "It's not your job."

"Better me now than a defense attorney later," said Blair. "If you'll excuse me, I have to go call one."

* * *

She did go home and start calling defense attorneys, hardly taking a moment to wonder how she'd come to be so firmly on Todd's side. He'd promised her that he wouldn't lie to her, and yet he had. To make matters worse, he'd taken their children along for the ride.

He hadn't done it out of manipulation, though. He wasn't even sure that he had lied. Hell, Blair was inclined to think that he hadn't lied at all. The closeness they'd felt before they'd made love couldn't have been anything but the truth. She knew it. She sensed it.

She had just about chosen a law firm when the front door of La Boulaie banged open.

"_Blair_!" shouted Tea.

Blair rolled her eyes. "Come right in, Tea!"

Tea's makeup was smeared and her eyes were wild. "I did it, okay? I let them open the grave. Told them to do it right away."

"And?" Blair prompted, bracing herself in case Tea starting throwing things.

"And you were right, you bitch! The coffin was full of sand."

Blair slumped into her chair. Even she had thought that her theory was ridiculous; it had been something to say to shed doubt on the situation more than anything else. Now it was turning out to be true.

"You're right about what Victor said, too," admitted Tea. "That was too… it was too generic for Todd. Victor would have said something sarcastic. Something awful. He wouldn't have been surprised. Everyone in this whole fucking town expected Todd to go after Victor."

"I'm so sorry, Tea," said Blair. She stood up to hug her friend.

"What do you have to be sorry for? You were right." Tea swallowed hard. "I'll get Todd out on bail this evening if I possibly can. You can switch over to another attorney for the rest of his defense."

Tea was gone before Blair could turn down the offer.

* * *

Victor Lord, Junior, had an unfortunate amount of experience when it came to being chained to a bed by a crazy woman.

Still, Allison was both crazier and smarter than Margaret. He had to find a way to use that to get back to Tea and Dani. He just had to. He knew full well that a marriage and a family might never recover from something like this.

Since Allison was smart, all Victor could do was push her crazy buttons over and over again until the crazy overwhelmed the brains. It might get him killed or maimed, but it was his best chance.

He leered at the ropes that kept him tied to the bed. (He knew that Margaret was watching jealously from somewhere in hell.) "You sure you're ready to start a relationship this soon after Mitch?" he asked around the gag. He had mostly worked it loose, but he was refraining from yelling in the hopes of luring Allison into a false sense of security.

"You wish, Victor Lord, Junior," she cackled. "You wish."

"You must miss Mitch, though," he prompted. "He was the Messenger and now he's dead."

In the past, that would have been enough to send Allison flying into a rage about the injustice of it all.

"If he was a true messenger, he will rise again in his time," said Allison serenely.

"If?" Victor pushed. The Allison he'd known would never have questioned Mitch in such away.

"I always was the brains behind the operation," said Allison mildly. "If I could convince him of the whole twins by different daddies thing, he wasn't really all-powerful, was he?"

"It took you ten years to realize that?"

"I was repressed," said Allison.

"And now you can't even confront him for that. I used to go down to my father's crypt and scream at him for the mess he got all of us into. It would have been better to be able to do it to his face, but at least there was the crypt until Viki had her bozo Charlie flatten it for her. Mitch doesn't even have a grave, does he? Natalie and John probably burned his body and roasted marshmallows over it."

Allison scowled and readjusted his gag.

Victor began the laborious process of working it out of his mouth again. He didn't think he'd pushed hard enough to send her off to retrieve Mitch's body. He certainly didn't have faith that John and Bo and the other idiots at the LPD would be able to summon the brain power to dangle Mitch's corpse in the hopes of flushing out Allison. Even worse, Bo and John might capture Allison and ignore her inevitable hints that she knew something about Victor.

Victor was going to die chained to a bed. It wasn't a bad way to go; he just really wished that Tea had been the one to do the chaining.

* * *

The next weeks were tense and awkward. Jack's anger at Todd had multiplied a thousandfold, and without Starr around to balance his rage with her sympathy, Todd was more miserable than ever. Blair didn't seem eager to bring their connection to the next level, either; she would meet him for lunch every day while her sons were in school and that was the best Todd was likely to get.

Even those lunches were full of pressure to talk to a counselor about post traumatic stress disorder and planted memories. His attorney, too, suggested that therapy would go a long way toward helping his defense. Unwillingly, Todd acquiesced. The more he spoke to Dr. Levin, the more he felt that his original memory was the real one, for all the good that did him.

Blair was usually his go-between with the cops, but she didn't have much news. She gathered that they were starting to think that Allison Perkins- the sole prison escapee still at large after the mass breakout that had sent Starr off into the sunset with Cole- had some sort of connection to Victor's presumed death. The evidence was tenuous at best. Allison had a half brother named Carl Peterson who had sometimes done business with both Todd and Victor and who had traveled to Llanview near the time of Victor's disappearance. It wasn't much. But at least it was a theory that didn't end with "and so everything is obviously Todd's fault."

Todd was more than a little worried, then, when he received a direct call from John to come down to the station.

Blair met him outside and took his hand. He tried to think of something flip and funny to say. He failed.

Tea ran headlong into Blair as soon as they were in the door. It took Todd a long moment to figure out whether Tea was attacking Blair or hugging her. (He'd liked Tea and Blair's relationship better when defenestration had been involved. He certainly wasn't going to start braiding John McBain's hair because they'd both married Blair.)

"Thank you so much, Blair," Tea babbled, laughing through her tears. "We might not ever have found him if it hadn't been for you."

"I told you not to tell her that. She's insufferable when she's right. Moreso than usual, even," said Victor, and Todd desperately sought Blair's gaze to see whether she heard him too.

Blair tightened her grip on Todd's hand to tell him that she did.

"Who shot you?" Todd asked Victor. "Were you actually shot?"

"Be careful, brother dear. I might start to think that you care."

"Okay, I'm only asking because I want Tea to stop accusing me of doing it."

"I already did that!" objected Tea.

"Regardless, I think we'd all like to know what happened," tried Blair. "We have four assorted children and another on the way." She nodded at Tea's swollen middle and Tea smiled. "It would be nice if we knew how this was going to affect them."

"But first, could the two of you stop acting like sister wives?" asked Victor.

"I have to agree," said Todd. "It's creepy. That's not your kid, Blair."

"He's going to be Sam's brother. Forgive Tea and me for trying to be adults about having a blended family."

Tea lit up. "That reminds me! I was shopping for a crib at Mulberry Road, and do you know what they had? That last Spiderman action figure we couldn't find for Sam at Christmas! I left it in my desk where Sam won't find it when he comes over, so whenever-"

"You should just tell me what happened," said Todd to Victor. "We're going to have to separate them to make it stop."

"I don't like agreeing with you," said Victor. "It makes me feel dirty."

Blair grinned at both Todd and Victor and kissed Tea on the cheek. Tea stroked Blair's hair in return.

"Carl Peterson never struck me as the kind of guy who did his own dirty work," Victor began hurriedly. "And I didn't really think his dirty work was kidnapping people who might know something about their crazy mother's paramilitary operations. And I didn't think his connections went deep enough to be able to switch out the evidence to use a bullet that came from your gun. Turns out I was wrong about that."

"Did the Keystone Cops manage to catch him?"

"Amazingly enough, yes. Allison, too. One way or another, they're going to pay for this."

Todd nodded and held out his hand to Victor. "Glad you're back. For the kids' sake."

Victor shook his hand. "I'll be suing you for the return of my fortune tomorrow."

"_Your_ fortune? None of that was-"

And then Blair pulled Todd away. "We'll have enough time to have that fight over and over for the rest of our lives."

"You gonna fight your bestie Tea?"

"If I have to." Blair kissed him deeply. "But I'd rather go home and go back to what we were doing before John interrupted us."

"We weren't together when he called," said Todd.

Blair kissed Todd again. "I didn't mean today."

A slow smile spread over Todd's face. "I think we were talking about singing."

"I think you should refresh my memory about how we got to that point."

Todd determined that that was something he could do.

**End**.

**Note**: _I think this is it for me writing Todd and Blair. I wish I'd written it back when OLTL first left ABC. It would have had more heart then, rather than echoing with my bitterness about the GH fiasco. Oh well._


End file.
